


Break

by De_Nugis



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Exhaustion, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, background moment of Sam/Amelia, leader!Sam, mentions of background character death, tired!sam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-02 11:18:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17263277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/De_Nugis/pseuds/De_Nugis
Summary: Max maybe wants out of the life. Sam's just tired.





	Break

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. This assumes that after the doll situation Max somehow allowed Alicia to move on fully, so warnings for background character death. 
> 
> 2\. I started out to annoy Tumblr by mentioning nipples a lot, but then I got sidetracked. There are still nipples, but it's not so much nipple!fic.

“My sensitive nipples are my superpower.”

Max had been a bit distant at dinner, moody. The Max Sam had first met comes and goes these days. But superpowered nipples are very Max. Sam relaxes into that with a small twinge of guilt.

“You have a lot of powers,” he says. “Don’t sell yourself short.”

Even if they’re just talking about in-bed superpowers, the nipples are only part of a compelling whole. Sam isn’t moving on from them just yet, but he’s got his eye on Max’s collarbone for later, and the corner of his jaw right under his ears, where he’s ticklish. That’s not even getting into below the waist. Max has a lot to offer below the waist. 

“Seriously?” says Max. “Are you seriously dissing my nipples? And disguising it as a compliment? Thus adding nipple insult to nipple injury?”

That's also very Max, that ability to deploy _thus_ es at times when lesser men become inarticulate. It could be a superpower. Sam certainly can’t manage a _thus_ right this second. In his defense, his mouth has things to do; Max shivers as Sam tongues the left supernipple. Also, Sam’s kind of tired.

“Mmm,” he says, articulately. 

Max grabs his neck and shakes a little. That’s either a _pay attention_ or a suggestion that Sam add some lateral motion to his nipple technique.

“Listen,” says Max, so apparently it was _pay attention_. “It’s not that I’m not a well-rounded person, with talents and interests and marketable skills. It’s not that I’m not personable in a range of situations, and also handsome. I am not, in any way, underrating myself. I am reflecting philosophically on superpowers.”

“Mmm,” says Sam again. Max is definitely handsome. And talented. His fingers have moved from the nape of Sam’s neck; he’s walking them up and down Sam’s spine now, like a keyboardist running scales. The firm rhythm of his touch and the low buzz of his voice are taking Sam’s head far away from the Bunker, from the stuff he carries around there like a lumpy, off-balance grocery bag full of dubious cans long past their expiration date. Michael. Jack. All those hunters. Whatever’s going on with Cas. That vague look Dean still gets sometimes. _Gone_ never really applies to archangels. Not to any archangels. That thought is a cold flutter at the base of Sam’s spine, where Max’s fingers can’t reach. 

“See,” Max goes on, and Sam is happy to be back on the topic of nipples, “my supernipples are a thing about me. They enhance some situations. But I’m not building my life around them. Just a few select moments that I get to choose. I think that’s what it should be like, with superpowers. I think the _with great power comes great responsibility_ stuff is bullshit. It traps people in their lives. Like, if you can spin spider silk out of your hands, that doesn’t mean a career in law enforcement is for you. You could become a high rise window cleaner. Or an artist. Or a pest-control guy. Or you could be an insurance broker and only do spider things on weekends, if at all. You should get to decide what bits of you matter where. The universe shouldn't impose your priorities.”

Sam stops what he was doing. Max’s fingers have gone still. There’s something important Max wants to talk about here. Sam should be paying attention, being a boyfriend, not a guy who’s in it for dinner and sex and falls asleep after. Or during, which is a possibility right now. Now that he’s not immediately engaged with the supernipples or working through plans for other body parts Sam can feel his life seeping back, tiredness dragging at him from one direction, tension building in the other. It’s the tug of war he was trying to escape with the getting laid.

Resenting Max for interrupting that with serious conversation would make Sam a bad person. That much is clear, even at Sam’s current level of mental functioning.

“I think being a pest control guy if you’re Spiderman is some kind of conflict of interest,” he says. It’s not a brilliant contribution, but it’s what he can dredge out of his brain at the moment. “Or maybe a painful dilemma.”

The dilemma sounds more likely, actually. It sounds like what would happen. You become some human-spider hybrid pest controller, and then you have to decide whether to kill your fellow spiders. Or maybe your fellow humans resolve the issue by killing you. The latter option is better. It doesn’t require effort. Sam closes his eyes. He can still listen that way. It might help him concentrate, even.

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” says Max sharply. 

Sam opens his eyes again. Max has tensed under him.

“What are we talking about?” says Sam. He sits up. Maybe that will drain the sleep deprivation fog and the sex fog from his brain. Max’s attention is clearly miles away from sex, despite the nipple theme, despite them being naked in bed and making out.

“Those people at the Bunker. Your troops. Your hunter harem.”

“They’re not my hunter harem,” says Sam. First Dean, now Max. He shouldn’t have had Max swing by there to pick him up. It’s just hard to make arrangements. He couldn’t very well take Dean’s car. They’d needed to go in Max’s truck. And he hadn’t been certain when he was going to be back. Meeting up at the Bunker had been easiest. “They’re, uh. Most of them aren’t from around here. From this reality. I’m just, it’s just, the Bunker’s a good place to run things from. It’s not really me.”

“They called you Chief. Which, by the way, is hot. Chief.” Max follows that up with a sharp pinch at one of Sam’s non-super nipples.

So maybe they’re back on sex. Sam’s having trouble following the segues. The thing is, Max is young. He’s been through a lot of shit lately, but he’s still young. He doesn’t get tired like Sam does. He can fit more things in his brain, in his life, he can turn corners in a conversation, he can change the subject. He’s nimble. These days Sam feels creaky and slow, practically geriatric. 

“You say a lot of things are hot. Are you sure you’re not letting your supernipples do your thinking?” 

“They’re thinky, it’s true,” says Max. His smile is gradual, full of a lazy power that goes straight to Sam’s cock. A few minutes ago he’d been wanting to fuck Max, but now he wants Max to fuck him. Let Max take the lead, let someone else do the work. Just, let someone else. That’s … seductive. Really seductive.

Max is still talking. “But, you know, I hung out for a bit, waiting for you to get back. That’s quite an operation you’ve got there. Impressive.”

It’s hard to see how Sam’s desperate, improvised scramble could impress anyone. If Max isn’t just teasing him, winding him up, riffing on the Chief thing.

“Uh, thanks,” Sam says. “I mean, they’re the ones doing the jobs. I’m just, like, coordinating.”

“But you’re good at coordinating. You have leadership skills. It got me thinking. About Alicia.”

Sam stays silent, tries to be still without freezing, so Max can make up his mind if he wants to go on. Max has his own off-kilter load of memories digging into his back, sharper and more immediate than Sam’s. Sam mostly just carries administrative stuff these days. It’s not like what Dean’s going through, or Max. If Max wants to talk, really talk, being here for him isn’t something Sam wants to mess up. He’s messed up often enough with Dean.

Max glances at him. Sam tries to be steady and there and wide awake.

“She wasn’t that into witchcraft, really,” Max says. So Sam must have looked awake enough. “It was my thing. And it was our mom’s thing.”

“Yeah,” says Sam, “I remember. We, uh, we talked about it a bit, me and Alicia. It was kind of something we had in common. Being the odd one out.”

“And I was thinking,” says Max. “Alicia was good. She was the smart one. She had good instincts. She wasn’t really into magic, but she was right about a lot of stuff. She was right about Mom. She was good. We made a good team, me and her. Me and her and Mom. But she didn’t have to make that her life, not when she didn’t really want to. We build our lives around this shit, we twist other people’s lives around it, and there’s no reason. If she’d been an architect, or a dog groomer, she’d still be alive. If I’d become a tattoo artist after all, if mom had been a, a florist, if none of us had done the stupid power and responsibility thing, if we’d just lived our lives, Alicia wouldn’t have been murdered. She’d never have been a doll.”

So that’s where this was going. Sam has conversations like this a lot, with people who have lost people. He ought to be better at it by now.

“Maybe,” he says, “but not necessarily. Bad things happen to people. Not just us, not just people in the life. Safe isn’t really something you can get. We, hunters, witches, whatever, we don’t have some kind of monopoly on bad things. A lot of regular people have regular bad stuff, or our kind of bad stuff. At least with hunting, witchcraft, we can help. Make sure some of the bad shit doesn’t happen. At least we get that.”

“Fucker,” Amelia had said, over and over, that first night, biting at Sam, smelling like alcohol, limes, dog, the salt of sweat and sex and tears. And Sam had flipped her over and thrust in hard and said “Yeah, fucking fucker.” They might as well have been talking about the same person. Fuckers who treat you like shit and die on you. Though Don and Dean both turned out to be Not Guilty of dying. But they hadn’t been different, that was the point. Don enlisted and Dean had his purgatory-is-pure thing. It was arbitrary, which one was which. Either could happen to anyone. It doesn’t matter. If Max thinks he could have escaped shit in some normal world, Max is delusional.

“Don’t,” says Max, and his voice is suddenly cold and vicious. “Don’t give me platitudes. Don’t give me platitudes about my sister. None of this anodyne _When Bad Things Happen To Good People_ chicken soup for the stupid. None of what happened to her had to happen. What I did to Alicia didn’t have to happen. I know that. If I can take responsibility for that, you can lay off pretending Alicia died of the human condition. She died of witchcraft. Hunting. This shit. Just like our mom. And then Alicia died again of me. And she didn’t have to. Mom didn’t have to. You and me and Dean and your hunter canon fodder harem don’t have to.You’re good at that leadership thing. You could do something with that. Something other than drawing up charts so each lemming has a buddy to jump off the cliff with.”

Yeah, Sam could go somewhere with that, he could go farther. He might read up on statistics, enter the data he’s gathered in his hunting lifetime in some spreadsheet, set up a database. He could project the attrition rates for his network. For his people. That would be fun. That would build some transferable skills. Sam takes a deep, careful breath. Max doesn’t usually push like this. He’s just going through stuff right now.

“Let’s make a deal,” Sam says. “I won’t say anything about Alicia. And you won’t say stuff about my people.”

There must be some deadliness in Sam’s voice as well, because Max backs off a little.

“OK,” he says, “I’m just saying. I didn’t mean you weren’t taking care of your, your people, that you’re doing a bad job. My point was the opposite of that. You’re doing a great job. You have stuff going for you, more than just hunting. Chief. I’m just saying that you have choices.”

Max says it like something new, some insight, not Groundhog Day. For a moment Sam catches a hint of it on the breeze, of the bait down the road past the trap. A few months ago, maybe a year, on the job, he’d talked to some guy about selling artifacts, saving up funds to get out. It had been a cover story, a lie. That’s as far as Sam’s gone down Bait Road in a while. It had been safe enough. But it had felt weird, saying the words, pretending.

The thing is, it isn’t like Sam’s in the trap. It’s more the other way round. The trap is in him. It’s incorporated. Surgery can’t get it out. If you opened Sam up now you wouldn’t even find it. You couldn’t tell its springs and catches from organs. They’re Sam’s heart and lungs. He’s a chimera, a cyborg. Max doesn’t get that he’s in bed with a cyborg.

So Sam’s metaphors have gone wild. So what. It’s because he’s tired. 

“Or what about your harem people?” Max goes on. “It wouldn’t just be you. If you explored options, you could be helping them. It’s a leader thing. Developing yourself is a leader thing.”

Speaking of being trapped. Sam wants out of this whole conversation. Time with Max was going to be Sam’s break from things. Though that was never fair. It’s not fair to want people to be breaks. People are people. Sam’s supposed to be doing his best for them, even when his best sucks. He tries to go on explaining, though impatience is rising through him, kicking up like a diver through the dense exhaustion.

“They’re not from this place. They’ve been in apocalypse world. You think we can fix them up with new lives like some witness protection thing? Give them asylum? Offer coding bootcamp and careers in web design? We don’t all have transferrable skills. Go to tattoo school if you want. You do have options. But we’re not in the same situation. I do not have transferrable skills.” 

“Why? Why aren’t your skills transferrable?”

Because the job has nothing to do with skills. Love, family, whatever it is, things Sam has seen and done, that’s not stuff you paperclip to your resume and send out. More like something Sam should lock down in a cage. Max doesn’t get it. He thinks the places Sam’s choices have taken him couldn’t be worse than what went down with him and Alicia. He’s wrong.

Sam’s voice rises.

“Because they’re not. Because they’re fucking not. Back off. You’re not my high school guidance counselor. You’re a fuck of a lot closer to high school than I am. Go design tattoos, if that’s your thing. Go take the easy way out. Stop bugging me. Some of us have got real work to do.”

Max looks more obstinately unconvinced than hurt. But Sam’s words wash back in his ears, ugly and accusing. He was supposed to be trying to help. Max had been trying to help. 

“Sorry,” Sam says. “That was shitty. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I’m, uh. Tired.” And suddenly that’s the understatement of the century. Jack died. He’s back, but. Dean was Michael, again. He’s back, but. And whatever Cas is hiding is probably due to become the next weight Dean carries around, the next on the list of things Sam should help him with. And Sam worries about Cas, just on his own behalf. And then there’s the everyday stuff. There’s a sticky on the corner of Sam’s desktop with jotted tasks he’s tracking. It doesn’t even have the nebulous bits, just regular day-to-day things. It’s … long. For a sticky. “I’m not sure I can go on doing this.” Which isn’t something Sam’s said to anybody.

“This is why you should consider a career change,” Max says instantly. He isn’t wasting energy reacting to Sam being an asshole. Maybe Max should go with prosecutor rather than tattoos. He picks up what you say and uses it against you. “Weren’t you thinking about law school at one point?”

Jesus fucking Christ.

“I can’t, OK?” Sam shouts. His voice comes out raw, like he’s been talking for hours. “Even if I could drop everything, stop fighting, let people down, what do you think I can do? Go out and, and research schools, fake that I finished my BA — how would I even do that — and take classes and write papers and, and get an interview suit that doesn’t look like cosplay FBI and then, what, apply for jobs? Apply to law firms? Buy a house? I can’t do more. I can’t fit it in. I can’t do one single thing more, and you want a whole other life. I can’t. I can’t do it. I’m sorry.”

Sam’s voice breaks humiliatingly. He gropes for one of the pillows they’d knocked down earlier, pulls it back onto the bed and drops his face in it. That doesn’t allow for breathing, but maybe breathing is one more thing Sam can streamline off his to-do list. And the pillow hides the stinging moisture in his eyes.

There’s a long, restful pause. Sam’s held breath steadies him, even as his lungs start to ache. Grey spangles begin to roil behind his eyelids. The patterns are slow, hypnotic. Then Max tugs at Sam’s hair. He does that sometimes, when they’re having sex. But right now he’s trying to leverage Sam off his pillow. Sam hugs it harder. Screw breathing. There’s that lumpy, edged weight of a world out there, this damn AU world Sam’s in where he’s some kind of leader.

Max wrenches the pillow away in one strong tug and pulls Sam up. Of course Max was going to win this. There’s a lot more left of him than there is of Sam. Oxygen flows painfully back to Sam’s lungs. Max’s face is right there, blinking.

“Exactly how tired are you?” the face asks. 

“My sleep deficit is my superpower,” says Sam. The words come out slurred, like he’s drunk.

Max pulls him over, onto his bare chest, positioning his head so Sam can breathe, like you do with drunk people so they don’t choke on vomit. Breathing isn’t so bad. Sam can manage it. His cheek is on one of the superpowered nipples. It’s restful. That’s probably kinky, thinking nipples are restful. Max’s hand has stopped pulling his hair and started stroking. Hair-pulling is a normal sex thing. Stroking is something else, something Sam might have to think about. But right now Sam’s too tired to be worried.

“OK,” Max is saying. “Maybe the career change diagnosis was off. At least for the moment. My new theory is that you need a vacation. A beach vacation. Let’s get a good night’s sleep and then find a beach.”

This has all turned upside-down. Sam was supposed to be listening to Max.

“You’re the one who should be due for a breakdown,” he says. “There’s nothing big wrong in my life. Everything’s under control.”

“And right there is where I start to worry about you.”

But really, Sam’s fine. What he’s got going on is just surface stuff, and being short of sleep. 

“Can we maybe go back to your nipples?” he says, “and forget that the rest of this conversation happened?” He angles his head, trying to get back to work on left supernipple. But Max’s hand holds him still.

“The nipples are OK with you getting a good night’s sleep and starting work in the morning. Say at eight. The nipples like punctuality. Morning is high energy time. The nipples like a lot of energy. The real movers and shakers are morning people. 8 AM sharp they’re expecting some moving and shaking.” Sam can’t see Max’s face, just a few inches of chest, but he knows Max is waggling his eyebrows absurdly. “Then we’re going to Google beach vacations. You and me, that is. My nipples don’t really Google. They’re thinky, but not dextrous. They delegate.”

“You make being your nipple servant sound like some prestigious internship,” Sam says.

Max puffs his chest expansively. It feels funny when Sam is lying on it.

“Prestigious doesn’t begin to cover it. If you went back to law school after all — don’t worry, this is strictly hypothetical — if you went back to law school and made law review, because you would, and graduated with honors and clerked for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, it would still not be the kind of guaranteed resume gold my nipples are offering you. So maybe it’s just as well you don’t want that. It would be a letdown. You don’t want your next career to be a letdown. For now you’d better stick to Chief Nipple Intern.”

Sam laughs. He wishes he could do this thing Max does, this thing Max is doing for them, nonsensing their way back to OK. Max is good at that. He could be a good barkeep, or he could teach troubled kids, he’d be great with them. Or he could become a diplomat, defuse international tensions with style and wit. He’d look good in a tux. Whatever he did, he could carve out some personal time for the nipples. Max is still young. He’s supple. He’s been through a lot of shit, but he isn’t tired, not down where it counts. He could still get out of the trap. To him the trap is still something outside, just a problem. He wouldn’t have to sacrifice limbs, even. He could do it with clever fingers, with what he knows, what he’s good at. He hasn’t melded. He doesn’t know what that looks like. He still doesn’t see it in Sam.

Sam wants that. Not for himself, but thinking about it for Max is restful, refreshing, not tiring like it is when it’s Sam. Sam can lean on it, warm and solid and supple and breathing.

“Since when am I the intern, anyway?” he asks. “You’re the upwardly mobile younger generation. You should be the intern.”

Max shrugs. Sam can feel it, though he’s closed his eyes.

“You work for the nipples. I call you Chief. There’s a balance of power.”

Sam weighs the thought of being in a balance. Being balanced sounds like heaven, compared to balancing. Good heaven, not shitty actual heaven. Buoyant, resilient, like the rise and fall of Max breathing. Someone else’s hand holding the scales. Let someone else, just for a bit. Just let someone else. 

“OK,” says Sam. He lets go and sleeps.


End file.
